The Old Man

The subsidy is paid on the ninth. Ray signs for it. Della puts the box in the cupboard. Walter asks for his own medicine on the eleventh and is told it is finished. The village clerk has the transfer slips; the old man has the receipts he kept in a tin under the bed since 1998. Walter Grey is eighty-one, lives alone at the end of the village road, and has one thing the whole family wants: a pension card and a subsidy cheque that arrives every quarter. His son Ray collects it for him. His daughter Nora arrives the day after it clears. His daughter-in-law Della keeps the heart medicine in a cupboard that only she can open, and explains to the neighbours that the old man forgets things. Thirty-one episodes about a card, a cupboard, a village clerk with a ledger, and what happens when an old man finally walks into the village office and asks to see the numbers himself.